News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
The Clay Commission approved its new fiscal year budget with a two percent pay raise for all county employees.
County Mayor Dale Reagan said they are keeping their focus on maintaining the county’s operations and not setting funds aside for any extra large-scale projects. Reagan said they were able to afford everything they needed despite keeping their property tax rate the same.
“Some of the revenue is starting to come in for us and everything,” Reagan said. “And we’re, hopefully it’ll come in as we have projected it will. And course, budgets are only a projection. And so hopefully, you know, that if it does seventy-five to eighty percent of what we’ve projected it will, I think we’ll be OK.”
Reagan said this will be the first full budget year since they took over the local ambulance service. He said they have allocated between $800,000 and $900,000 for the operations of that department.
“Last year we picked them up around mid-May, so we really didn’t have a feel about how much, you know, that would wind up, you know, because we (were) finishing out that budget year,” Reagan said.
Reagan said they received about $100,000 less in revenue than expected due to the county’s appraisal ratio being impacted by recent growth.
“This has been on the books for years,” MTAS County Government Consultant Wesley Robertson said. “But we’ve just never had a market where real property’s jumped this much in this short a period of time so we didn’t notice it. It was five percent instead of thirty percent.”
Robertson said the county should have enough growth in it to offset some of the challenges brought on by the high appraisal ratio.
“If we were to keep growing and really booming like Middle Tennessee has done and I know (the) Upper Cumberland’s done the same thing, I mean you’re going to take probably another lick in ’26,” Robertson said.
Reagan said now that the budget is passed the workers in his office need to send it to the comptroller’s office for final approval.
“Hopefully it’ll look good to them and they’ll give us a letter of approval and then we can carry on,” Reagan said. “By the time we get that done, it’ll be time for us to start thinking about next year’s budget.”
